


Do Something

by shayera



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene, Portal incident
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-16
Packaged: 2019-03-19 01:00:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13693590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shayera/pseuds/shayera
Summary: The portal goes dark and Stanley is left with an incomprehensible journal, a painful brand, and his own thoughts.





	1. Chapter 1

_“Stanley! Stanley! Do something! Stanleeey!”_

He’s trying. He pounds on the portal frame, then turns around to struggle with the nearby lever. When that doesn’t work he rushes back to the control room and starts pressing buttons and turning switches. There has to be something that’ll turn the damn thing back on. Anything. He bangs his fists on the monitor boards, vaguely aware that he’s not thinking clearly but too panicked to pay it any heed.

_You fucked up again. You had one chance and you fucked up everything again._

That portal just ate his brother alive, and it’s all Stanley’s fault. He shoved him right into it. One push was all it took to ruin everything for Ford again, just like a decade ago.

_I didn’t mean it I didn’t mean it I didntmeanit_

Why did he even come here? Why is he even still alive? He should have know he’d fuck up, he’d make everything worse, but not _like this..._

_Why won’t it open? What’s wrong with it?_

He’d been pissed off, yes, and disappointed, and lashing out, but he never wanted this. He’d just wanted his brother back. His best friend, his other half. A chance to be together again. He should have known that wouldn’t happen. He should have known to stay away, for Stanford’s sake, even when he was asked to come. His brother didn’t deserve this. Didn’t deserve his fuck-ups. Didn’t deserve to be _gone_. Further away than ever, lost in a void on the other side of reality for all Stanley could tell. _Dead_. (He’s not dead, he can’t be dead.) Dead or worse, and if Stanley can’t make the portal open again that’s the end of it.

Stanford’s last words in this world repeats in his mind like a broken record.

_“Stanley! Do something!”_

He’s got no idea what he’s looking at. If the damned thing opened once it should be able to open again, but there are so many controls, and nothing helps, nothing happens. The machine is dead.

Eventually the adrenaline wears off.

He realizes almost as a chock that the back of his right shoulder is a smoldering mass of pain. It hurts like hellfire, and even more so when he moves. Using his right arm is like touching his shoulder with white-hot pokers. Stanley stumbles against the console, barely managing to keep himself upright by supporting himself with his left arm. He curses out loud, but his voice is cracking.

He can’t see. Is he going blind, too? He blinks. Oh, that’s tears. He’s crying like a baby, hating himself with fire hotter than the burn.

_Deep breaths. Calm down. Don’t fuck this up more._

Fucking it up more is probably not possible, but if anyone could do it, it’d be him.

He bites down on the pain as he makes his way back to the big chamber with the portal. The book. The journal, the one Standford had wanted hidden – but not destroyed – so badly. There’s supposed to be instructions for how to operate the portal there, right? He can still handle this.

He slumps on the floor next to where he’d dropped the journal, grinding his teeth as the edges of his burnt coat rubs against the wound. Stanford’s fallen glasses are there, too. He picks them up carefully, considers it for a second, then decides to hell with it and puts them on. Turns out Stanford and him still have the same prescription – the world immediately goes into sharp mode. It’s been years since last time Stanley used glasses, and it brings back memories he’s not going to deal with now.

_“Stanley! Do something!”_

It’s easier to read when he doesn’t have to squint or hold the book close to his face, though. Using mostly his left hand, he starts flipping the pages of his brother’s journal.

There’s stuff about the portal here, alright. There are pieces of schematics and pages upon pages of handwritten notes in Ford’s familiar, neat cursive. Perhaps enough to figure out how the portal is supposed to be operated, because flailing around wildly isn’t going to do it. These notes are the key. He’ll have to… Have to…

Stan stares at the pages as if staring would somehow make it make sense. It doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t. He doesn’t know half of the words Stanford uses, and the other half is meaningless without context. Key parts seems to be written in goddamn _code_. And he was explicitly told this book wasn’t all of it. There’s supposed to be more journals somewhere, so maybe the most important stuff isn’t even here.

The burn on his back is throbbing to the beat of his too-loud heart. He blinks back tears again. A drop lands on the edge of a page, and he quickly wipes it away before it makes a stain.

_You’ll never understand this._

Stanford is a genius, has always been a genius. Stanley was the stupid twin. He was never even close to keeping up back when they were an inseparable team and believed they’d be so forever, and now – Stanford has left Stanley lightyears behind, and it’s all incomprehensible gibberish.

_He’s gone and you killed him._

Stanley closes the journal with more force than he meant to.

_“Stanley! Do something!”_

“I’m sorry, Sixer,” Stan whispers to the echo in his mind. “I’m so sorry.” He gently takes his brother’s glasses off and put them in his coat pocket.

He’ll do something. He just doesn’t know what. He’s tired and cold and in more pain than he’d like to admit, both physically and not. But he’ll have to fix this even if it kills him.

It’s several minutes before he can force himself to move again. It occurs to him that he should probably do something about that burn. Yeah. That’s sensible. A mundane task, something he can handle, and maybe when he hurts less he’ll be able to think more clearly.


	2. Chapter 2

Stanford’s lab is deep underground, chilly and gloomy, but the house itself is barely any warmer or brighter. Stanley’s hands are trembling as he stumbles out from the heavy door that serves as the exit from the basement. He fumbles around for a light switch, but can’t seem to find one. Nevermind. All he needs to find is a bathroom, somewhere with a mirror and cold water to put out the fire on his shoulder.

For a moment he considers leaving the house and burying himself in snow. That would sooth the burn, and if he stayed long enough, maybe it would sooth the rest of the turmoil inside him as well.

_You can’t think like that. You can still fix this. Ford needs you._

Stan makes his way through Ford’s house like a burglar in the night. It doesn’t feel like the home of a brother. It doesn’t feel like a home at all. It’s a mad scientist’s lair, a stranger’s hideout, filled with strange instruments, weird knick-knacks, dead _things_ in jars and tanks, books and scribbled pieces of paper scattered everywhere. There’s some light from unidentifiable glowing contraptions, but most of the illumination comes in through the small, stained-glass windows, filtered through the falling snow outside. Perhaps it’s the semi-darkness that does it, but now that Stanley is alone here, the place doesn’t just feel unfamiliar – if he didn’t know better, he’d call it outright _cursed_.

_If it wasn’t cursed before, it certainly is now, after what you did._

There’s a broken window in the small room that might be a kitchen. A dusting of snow has gathered on a collection of garbage on the table. The draft definitely doesn’t help against the chill, but something about it makes Stan stop and stare. He’s seen a few shattered windows before, and for one thing, this was obviously broken from the inside. For another thing, there are brown stains on the sharp edges around the hole. Blood.

He swallows. He’d been so angry at Stanford for acting like a paranoid lunatic with a stick up his ass that he’d barely wondered what had happened to him to make him that way.

_“You don’t know what I’ve been through!”_

He really doesn’t know. For a moment he’s overcome with the fantasy of sitting down with his brother, having a beer with him or whatever nerd drink of his choice. _Talking_ to him. Finding out what’s up. Like he was still his brother, his twin, his best friend. Like he was still _here_.

But he isn’t, and Stan still has a wound that needs tending.

He finally finds a bathroom and almost wishes he hadn’t. It stinks like the garbage cans outside a cheap motel at night, and he doesn’t care to consider why that was his first comparison. Turns out someone – _his brother_ – has been puking both in the toilet and elsewhere, probably more than once, and it hasn’t been flushed in a while. There are darker stains, too.

This time Stan’s hand does find a light switch, and he’s almost surprised to find that the bathrooms lights are functional. He wants to be surprised when the light reveals the darker stains to be blood, but this time he really isn’t. Not surprised, but there’s a lump of lead in his guts that he doesn’t know whether to call anger or fear or just plain helplessness. There’s a lot of blood, some of it is fresher than other. It’s on the floor, on the sink, in the bathtub. And on the wall – the blood stains turn into scribbled words.

‘CAN’T SLEEP,’ a bloody finger has written on the clink in shaky capitals, not once, but over and over. ‘CAN’T SLEEP CAN’T SLEEP CAN’T SLEEP HE IS WATCHING.’

Stan leans his forehead against the doorframe and squeezes his eyes shut, trying to breathe and not add to the mess by throwing up, too. Somehow, he’s successful enough to open his eyes again. He realizes he’s cradling Stanford’s journal against his chest, gripping it hard enough that his fingers have stiffened.

_“You have no idea what I’m up against!”_

Best case scenario: Stanford was up against rampant insanity. Worst case scenario... He has no idea. Or rather, pieces of ideas pop into his mind, but none of them make sense. And there’s so much blood. He tries to think back if Stanford had been wounded – he supposes he might have been, under his clothes. He’d definitely been pale as a ghost, with purple-black sacks under his eyes.

“‘Can’t sleep’, huh,” Stanley mutters, more to break the silence than for any other reason. The more he thinks, the more he wants to throw up again.

Whatever it was, Stanford was fighting it alone. No one had his back.

_He was desperate enough to call for you, but you didn’t exactly have his back either._

Stanley slowly loosens his grip on the journal and very carefully puts it down on the relatively cleaner floor in the hallway. His shoulder is still smoldering and this _is_ a bathroom.

He flushes the toilet as he passes it on the way to the sink. The plumbing still works, although the effect on the stench is marginal. The sink is filthy, too, but the tap works fine. He finds himself using his left hand splashing water on his face and rubbing his eyes before he manages to face his reflection in the mirror.

The glass is broken, splintered like someone banged their fist against it. Across the cracks there are more words scribbled in blood. ‘HELP ME,’ it says. Only that, but somehow that’s what finally brings tears back to Stanley’s eyes.

“Damn you, Poindexter!” he growls, louder than he’d intended. He meets his reflection’s gaze, and for a moment he could have sworn it’s not his own but Stanford’s bloodshot eyes staring back at him. “I would have helped you! All you had to do was to—to— _not_ ask me to go away again!”

It’s no use.

_All_ you _had to do was to not push him into his own Portal._

It’s no use, because one of them might be guilty of straight up fratricide, and it’s not Stanford.


End file.
